Unfollowed?

Twitter timeline zero

Over the years, my Twitter followed list had become somewhat cluttered… Just over 4,000 accounts – the usual mixture of friends, family, colleagues, partners, thought leaders, brands and celebrities.  I’d had a few occasional cleanups, but put it this way, it was becoming difficult to see the wood for the trees.  The signal to noise ratio had become pretty awful, and most of the value I was seeing from Twitter came through the search terms I used in Tweetdeck columns, rather than from my timeline.  Thankfully, I’d never been a Twitter completionist, as quite frankly there was no way I had a hope of coming close in the past couple of years!

So what to do?

Reboot.

Put quite simply, it was time to start again.

So as of this morning, I’ve unfollowed every single account that I was was following:

followed

How did I do that?  Well here’s the trick.  Open up your following list in Google Chrome, and scroll all the way to the bottom.  It currently loads 12 accounts at a time, so in my case I had to keep scrolling for a long time.  Then open the Chrome Javascript Console, and enter the following jQuery command:

$('.user-actions-follow-button').click()

Leave it to run for a few seconds, and you’ll see that every single ‘following’ button gets toggled back to ‘follow’.  Of course, if you wanted to just unfollow a sub-section of accounts, you could search for them and then run the command.

So what now?

My plan is to follow Luis Suarez’s example, and to start using lists in a big way to manage my Twitter use, and to allocate each to a column in my Tweetdeck dashboard.  I know this isn’t exactly revolutionary, but do think it will force me to be more selective over whom I let enhance/pollute my timeline, and thus my attention.  At the same time, I’ve opened up my DM preferences to allow anyone to direct message me even though I’m not following them…

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Twitter 2009

Twitter 2009 – by the numbers

It’s been yet another busy year on Twitter:

Twitter 2009
(Click to enlarge)

… though unlike many others, my overall Tweetings haven’t increase substantially over 2008.  Instead, I believe that the types of tweets have changed, with more discussions taking place and more relationships being built and strengthened through the medium of micro-blogging.  In addition, Collaboration Matters now has many other Twitter accounts besides my own, so these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg…

Of course, this graph doesn’t take in to account the thousands of micro-blogging updates added elsewhere, on Facebook, FriendFeed, our own Lotus Connections social collaboration platform, and on many environments that belong to our customers and partners.  There is no doubt that micro-blogging (or ‘influence awareness’ as I often term it) is increasing in importance, is more readily accepted by individuals and organisations alike, and is definitely here to stay!

Here’s to a Tweet-tastic 2010!

My Tweets

Who says I’m not positive?

I have, on occasion, been accused of being too negative.  I never believed that this is truly the case – I try to tell things as they are, happy to represent them in a positive light but also pulling up aspects that don’t meet the standard I would expect.

So I was happy to see that when displaying a cloud of my tweets via TweetStats and Wordle, the two terms I most often use in my Tweets are…  Good and Great!

My Tweets

Yay!

How connected are you?

Seeing as it is universally recognised that all us Lotus bloggers are ASWs (!), you’ll be wanting to know how’s you’re rated as far as being “connected” in the community, right?

Well, at least in the Twitter world, that’s now possible, albeit in a rather simplistic way.  Enter, twitter.grading.com. Simply type in your Twitter ID (or someone elses), and you get an indication of how they rank for “influence”.  E.g. my ID gives the following:

Twitter Grade: 80 – Rank #3,453 out of 17,554

The Twitter Grade measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score. A grade of 80 means that the user scores higher than 80 percent of the other user profiles that have been graded.


Your grade is calculated using a combination of factors including:


* The number of followers you have

* The power of this network of followers

* The pace of your updates

* The completeness of your profile

* …a few others.

For comparison, here are some notables in the community:

@belgort 85%
@edbrill 92%
@vowe 88%
@alanlepo 86%

Clearly, still some ‘AS’ to be done 😉

* Update *
Can’t believe I missed Mr. Social Networking himself, Chris Miller!  He rates a 90% too.

Twellow :: Twitter Search Directory, Twitter Search Engine

Twellow, hello…

I’m sure most of you will be aware that I’m a bit of a Twitter nut these days, and am always on the lookout for good new folks to follow.  Most of the time I find them via other contacts’ replies, or else using some of the recommendation engines that are out there, but there is definitely a place for a new tool or two.

So say hello to Twellow 😉

Twellow :: Twitter Search Directory, Twitter Search Engine

This is a Twitter directory – type in the name of a contact to find out more about them (e.g. the Brillmeister):

Image:Twellow, hello...

or else browse by category to find others you aren’t aware of:

Image:Twellow, hello...
Whilst there are definitely a few rough edges to be smoothed, this is definitely one I’ll add to my ‘twoolbox’ 😛

Image:What’s your Twitter Karma?

What’s your Twitter Karma?

Good spot by the ever-alert Chris Miller, Your Twitter Karma:

Image:What’s your Twitter Karma?

The site describes itself thus:

So, what is it? The other day, @StephAgresta said, “Twitter desperately needs page navigation on followers / following list. Also sort functionality by type (reciprocated or not) is a must.” I suggested a simple mashup that implements this and started hacking on it. Three days later, it has enough functionality that Stephanie said she thinks I should release it publically.

Basically, it’s a Flash application that fetches your friends and followers from Twitter when you click the “Whack!” button, then displays them for you, letting you quickly paginate through them. By default, the list contains all your friends and followers and is sorted by last update, showing those who most recently updated first. You can sort the list alphabetically either ascending or descending by Twitter ID. You can filter the list in several ways: only friends or only followers, all friends or all followers, and mutual friends.

It’s not meant to be a full Twitter client–there’s plenty of those already and that’s not a particularly interesting or challenging problem to solve, anyway. I’ll be adding a few more features to Twitter Karma soon, though. If you think you have a must-have feature idea, go ahead and let me know about it in the comments.

As usual with these Twitter add-ons, this site does just a few small things, but does them very very well.

1) It shows all your Twitter friends, displaying whether you follow them, they follow you or both,
2) It displays when they last updated, so you can easily delete the ones that haven’t updated in a while,
3) It allows one to easily reciprocate following status by bulk-following contacts that are following you.

It provided me with a very easy way to check that I was following all the Lotus folks that had asked to follow me.  I like it!

Great post on why Twitter is important to IBM

Super post by David Tebbutt, entitled “To Twit, to who?“:

Like blogging, Second Life, instant messaging, Facebook and all the other social computing activities before it, at first glance Twitter looks a bit mad and potentially very disruptive. It is, essentially, mini-blogging. 140 characters to say what you like when you like. Your posts appear on your followers’ screens or on their phones.

You can be certain that companies like IBM and Microsoft are watching with interest. And, no doubt, many of their staff will be participating enthusiastically. As with all the previous social activities, they’ll mine value out of it, if there’s any value to be mined. Then they’ll try to either replicate it within their own collaboration suites or, if they have to, make sure that this stuff can be surfaced within their own offerings.

So what about Twitter? Time-wasting nonsense was my predominant reaction to it for several months. I made the same mistake that I did with blogging, predominantly that I thought I had to keep up with everything. It’s not possible. I thought the posts were largely pointless. Many of them are. Just like blogging, some are silly, some are irritating while some deliver direct value. Some Twitterers do all three, depending on their mood. The best ones are of the ‘hey look at this’ variety. If someone you respect enough to follow says this, then you’re probably going to welcome such a tip-off.

David makes some great points so if you’re at all interested in what all the Twitter fuss is about, go take a read.

Twittering Lotusphere!

What an awesome idea, Chris has created a Twitter channel for Lotusphere08:

In order to foster faster communication with everyone at Lotusphere, or even if you just wish to sit back and watch, there will be a Lotusphere channel you can follow and post to.  Twitter is setting it up so if you set yourself to follow all the tweets, you can also post to it so everyone gets them.  Talk about instant communication when not everyone can be on Sametime and there is breaking news, a vendor giving away cool stuff, when you want to find people or when a vendor has an open party.  The possibilities are endless.  I talked to some Loti in and around the social networking area to see if they had anything built for this, the immediate answer was they didn’t think so.

http://twitter.com/lotusphere

everyone should set Twitter to FOLLOW. You can follow any profile on Twitter by sending follow+username.  For example, people would send:

follow Lotusphere

to Twitter from IM or phone.  People can also go right to the profile page, where you can click the  “follow” button located under the profile name.

This will be a great way for all the attendees (and those that don’t make it to Orlando) to follow the news, gossip and trends from the best tradeshow out there.  Join twitter now, and subscribe to follow the #Lotusphere channel today.  Follow me too!

jaiku-logo

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em – Jaiku

Yes, I’ve signed up to Jaiku. For those that aren’t aware, internet presence awareness tools such as Twitter and Jaiku have been around for about 6-9 months now, providing a means to tell others on the ‘net what you’re up to, thinking, involved in etc, either via a web browser or your mobile phone. You can also sign up to view other peoples messages (“Tweets” in Twitters terminology) so you can keep track of others too.